white, that burned like an electric bulb. She let her eyes trickle over its scores and bruises as she tried to catch her breath. She wasn't sure how long it took her to realize it was the moon.
She was about to pass out from exhaustion, which would have meant freezing to death. So she forced herself to stand up and stagger to the back of the sledge. She had trouble opening the storage hutch. The lining of her gloves had been shredded to ribbons in the climb. She bit a few of the scraps loose with her teeth. She didn't want to look at her hands, didn't want to know, but her eyes couldn't avoid them for long. The flesh of her palms had peeled and folded over on itself like the skin of a rotten peach, and the tips of her fingers – all ten of them – were black with frostbite. Jesus Christ. She fumbled at the latch and eventually managed to release it. The moon gave her just enough light to see by. She treated herself with the antiseptic cream and bandages she found in the first- aid kit, and then she slipped her mitts back over her hands and turned them over in the light, investigating the outline of each of her fingers to make sure they weren't crooked or doubled over at the knuckles. She couldn't feel a goddamned thing.
It took her longer than she would have expected to set the tent up. She staked it down, shut herself inside, and waited for the heat of the soft coil to fill the air.
After a few minutes, she felt the frost melting from her hair and eyebrows. Her pants and coat gradually softened and fell slack around her body. She knew that she should take them off before she got into her sleeping bag, but she didn't have the energy.
That night, the wind came howling down from the mountains, and by the time she woke up, the air outside was black with snow, a single surging mass of it that made it impossible for her to leave the tent, much less haul the sledge. She spent the next three days sleeping and eating, waiting out the storm. She listened to the gusting noise of the snow as it rode the wind. The blood slowly returned to her capillaries with a puncturing sensation that made her twist inside her skin, and her palms and fingers gradually began to heal.
On the third day, for reasons that were inexplicable to her, she began thinking about the small neighborhood park that was located just down the street from her apartment. In the center of the park was an area of red brick and iron benches, a gathering place carved out of the root-broken dirt where people liked to read books and walk their dogs and lobby one another to sign petitions. She had been through four winters in the neighborhood, but somehow she couldn't remember ever going to the park in the snow. It was a spring place – a summer place and an autumn place, too, perhaps, but mostly a spring place. The bricks and iron benches were constantly warmed by the sun, and the trees, a few dozen shadowy oaks and pines, always seemed to be leafing out.
The place was so different from this tent of hers in the middle of the ice storm, the only still spot for miles around. Maybe that was why she kept thinking about it: in the same way that the tent was a refuge from the weather, the park was a refuge from the present, a shelter she could rest inside while the cold and wind went rushing and swirling around her.
She remembered the rollerbladers she saw there, how they would weave so swiftly through the crowd, separating and coming back together again in that graceful, nimble, impulsive way they had that always reminded her of a flock of birds. There was a group of four elderly women who played mah-jongg around a small brick plateau near her bench, sitting on picnic chairs they carried into the park themselves. They always yelled at the rollerbladers when the kids passed too close to them, shaking their fists and cursing in a foreign language. One of the women sometimes brought her granddaughter along with her, a melonlike baby who would happily spend the entire day sucking on a blank mah-jongg tile. Once, when Laura was leaving the park, she had leaned over the baby to untangle her blanket for her, and the baby had grasped Laura's finger in a surprisingly firm fist, bringing it to her mouth and working it between her gums.
'A little help here?' Laura had said to the women at the mah-jongg table. 'Hello?'
But they had ignored her, hunching protectively over their tiles. Eventually, she had managed to extract the finger herself, and when she turned to leave, she found a man waiting behind her. He was canted over on his bicycle, propping himself up with his left foot. He appeared to be laughing at her. She laughed, too, and the man handed her a bandanna to wipe the saliva from her finger – 'Here you go' – and when he asked her if he could take her out for a drink sometime, she said yes.
That was Mike Hargett, who became her final short-lived boyfriend, the one who had told her that the shade of lipstick she was wearing made him want to bite her lips off.
And then there was the time she gave a book of matches to a man she had never met before, a man in hiking boots and a business suit – such a little thing, but she had never forgotten it. 'You don't have a light, do you?' the man had asked her, and though she did not smoke, she realized she was still carrying the matchbook she had picked up from a restaurant the night before.
She felt a tiny electric rush as she reached into her purse for it – delighted, the way she had been as a child, by her ability to carry out a favor for someone. 'Keep it,' she told the man, and he struck a match, cupped the flame to his cigarette, and walked away.
The latest war had just ended, and it seemed that the entire city had come together in the park. A woman was joggling a rubber ball from hand to hand. A man was walking his dog. There were a few police officers milling about, and here and there she spotted the yellow collars of the IAS operatives who could always be found in any large crowd. 'Infectious Agents Squad,' they would introduce themselves. 'I need to search your bag, ma'am.' A little girl was balancing clusters of pine needles around a twig she had poked into the ground, a jump rope slung over her shoulder. Two teenage boys were holding hands and whispering to each other. An old woman sat down on a bench, slipped her shoes off, and began muttering in Italian as she stretched her toes out. Laura watched a man pass by carrying a sign that read, JESUS IS COMING, DON'T BE DECEIVED. At the bottom of the placard he had written the word SINCERELY, as though signing a letter, after which he had printed his name.
Laura tried to remember the name the man with the placard had used, but she couldn't. Carter? Carlson? Carlsbad. Cavern. Stalactite. Stalagmite. Stalag. Gulag. Labor camp. Labor pain. Birth. Life. Creation. It was something unusual like that, she thought, something like Carter or Carlson – or Creation, for that matter – something with a hard C. But it wouldn't come to her. The tent belled out as the wind fell still and sank for a few seconds and then began gusting again. She lay back inside her sleeping bag, staring into the hollow darkness.
Carmen. Kevin. Kermit.
What on earth had the man written on the placard? By the time she had stopped wondering, she was well on her way to sleep.
ELEVEN. THE CHANGES
Winter had come to the city, and the snow covered every level surface: the roads and the sidewalks, the fountains and the park benches, even the leaves on the trees, or at least the ones that weren't cocked over onto their sides. Lindell Trimble had to wade through a solid foot of the shit every morning just to make his way down the steps of his building, and there was more waiting for him wherever he went. On most of the district's streets and sidewalks it melted under the day's traffic, then froze again after the sun fell, so that a glasslike sheen of ice whose only visible effect was to slightly magnify the pavement would send person after person sprawling onto his ass. He stood at his door sometimes and watched them fall, one ridiculous tumble after another. They looked like monkeys or rag dolls, barely human, and the idea that he himself might cut so pitiable a figure, that some smug son of a bitch in a three-piece suit might watch him sliding around on the ice and cringe, was appalling to him. This was why he always walked through the banks of snow along the curb, despite the damage it did to his shoes and the cuffs of his pants.
That morning in particular he was squeezing around the side of an abandoned car when the motherfucking beggar came at him again, the one he could never seem to shake. He launched straight into his brother-can-you- spare-a-dime routine: 'Got some change for me today? Hey, come on, buddy. You look like a man of wealth and power. I'm sure you've got a little change you can give to a fellow in need, don't you?' And blah blah blah blah blah.
